Spectacular Suffering by Mallipeddi Ramesh;

Author:Mallipeddi, Ramesh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Figure 7. “Negroes Sunday Market at Antigua,” W. E. Beastall, ca. 1806. (Private collection, © Michael Graham-Stewart/ Bridgeman Images)

Figure 8. “Sunday Morning in the Country,” Richard Bridgens, from West India Scenery with Illustrations of Negro Character (London: R. Jennings, [1836?]), lithograph. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

The contrast between slaves’ labor on the sugar plantations—that is, in commodity production—and their work in provisioning and market exchange in sites of social reproduction is best understood through E. P. Thompson’s famous distinction between timed and task-oriented labor.49 For Thompson, timed labor, performed for the benefit of the employer during the workday, is regular, monotonous, and alienating; conversely, task-oriented activity, undertaken for oneself, is purposive and irregular, lengthening or contracting according to the work at hand. Moreover, whereas time orientation is predicated on a separation between work and life, labor and social intercourse, in task orientation, these spheres intermingle and overlap. Although Thompson first proposes this distinction to explain work rhythms under industrial capitalism and although, under chattel slavery, task work was in fact time-oriented, this distinction nevertheless remains germane because the plantation was a place not only where slaves labored but also where they lived. The difference in the duration, pace, and organization of labor between the slaves’ experience of commodity production and of social reproduction could not be more pronounced: in the fields, slaves were divided into gangs according to age, sex, skills, and strength and toiled under the supervision of overseers to complete preassigned work. On the other hand, subsistence farming was largely unsupervised and the division of labor less rigid, with slaves tending to crops in family groups and performing a variety of tasks, including rest, the visiting of kin, and religious worship. The household, in short, was the unit of petty production. Similarly, the significance of marketing was simultaneously economic and social. Even as slaves were prohibited from leaving plantation estates without a pass on workdays, they were allowed, even during moments of unrest, to travel freely to markets—to colorful, noisy, and riotous gatherings throughout the Caribbean. Slaves went not only to trade but also to meet friends and relatives, gossip, gamble, drink, and socialize. James Stuart, a longtime resident in the Caribbean, disapprovingly described the slave market as a “sort of hebdomadal carnival,” a place of sport, merriment, dissipation, and excess.50

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